A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4862

by Garbage • 13 years ago

235 224 13 years ago

lambda-the-ultimate.org

Daishiman• 13 years ago

This sounds suspiciously similar to Rust.

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

No, but this is Microrust

It's completely not at all the same, but still familiar to rust programmers.

It's but built for the enterprise with advanced patented technology.

The yearly license fee will include responsive customer service.

ABS• 13 years ago

well, if we only look at the language and the "recent" past then C# is both an Ecma and ISO standard.

yes, it's only one example among 1000s of opposite ones but things are changing even in Microsoft, very slowly, with lots of setbacks, but they are. They won't transform MS anytime soon and possibly ever but I see saner pockets emerging.

InclinedPlane2• 13 years ago

That's not how languages in the .net ecosystem have worked in the past. C# is an open, ecma standard, as is the specification of the common language infrastructure (the VM/byte-code design for running .net programs). And MS publishes the language specifications for VB and F#. That's why it's possible to run .net code on linux without ever paying MS. There's even an open source F# compiler.

Moreover, the .net compilers, library, framework, and run-time are, and have been, provided for free, as is a version of the IDE. All of which can be used to develop commercial applications. The only requirement being that they run on a Windows OS. Even so, you can run all of this from within WINE, again without ever paying MS any money whatsoever.

The idea that MS is out to envelope developers by enticing them into a language that requires massive cash outlays or ongoing licensing fees is not supported by reality.

thomasz2• 13 years ago

I'm really appalled by the hostility that's being displayed here. This is Microsoft research in Cambridge, not the Xbox one marketing department. You know, the guys who work on Haskell, ported OCAML to .net and generally do a lot of awesome stuff.

What have you created that justifies this kind of an attitude?

ewoodrich• 13 years ago

codingbinary, you are hell-banned (your comments are invisible to the vast majority of users).

Your comments aren't all "great", but they seem to be in good faith. I feel that a friendly reminder to strive to post substantive and relevant comments [1] would be a far more appropriate remedy than killing your account after your second comment.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ksk7• 13 years ago

Yes it does, but IMO only superficially. Rust has a completely different type system model and also Rust is not aimed at high performance applications, while this seems to be. Many(most?) new languages fade away because nobody is interested in implementing compilers/libraries writing documentation/teaching material/etc etc. I'll be impressed if they can ship something next year.

ehsanu1• 13 years ago

Rust aims to match C++ in performance.

pcwalton3• 13 years ago

Rust has a completely different type system model

What are the differences? It sounds pretty similar to Rust—"rvalue references, move semantics, destruction, references / borrowing" are straight out of Rust's playbook.

Granted, if it's based on C#, it sounds like it'll be more object-oriented than Rust is, which is a difference. Rust has some object-oriented features, but they're much more minimalist than what C# offers; idiomatic Rust prefers composition over inheritance, etc.

Rust is not aimed at high performance applications

This week has been bizarro week for weird things people are saying about Rust. :)

Rust is about zero-cost abstractions, period. It's right there on the Wikipedia page: "Performance of safe code is expected to be slower than C++ if performance is the only consideration, but to be comparable (and sometimes faster) than C++ code that manually takes precautions comparable to what the Rust language mandates." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_%28programming_language%29

Mozilla is explicitly investing in Rust in order to build the fastest browser engine around and has been from day one…

ek• 13 years ago

The tech report version of the OOPSLA paper Joe mentions, about a type system for side effect understanding, is here: https://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=170...

riffraff• 13 years ago

also from MSR, Koka[0] has effect types and a sweet online repl!

[0] http://rise4fun.com/koka/tutorial

keypusher• 13 years ago

Sounds great, but I'll wait to see some actual code before getting my hopes up.

greatsuccess• 13 years ago

C++ does not perform, is not a managed language, and has nothing to offer. What could he possibly be talking about?

I read this as MS once again getting it completely wrong. Seriously C++ solving managed languages performance and memory problems?

Physician, HEAL THY SELF.

adamnemecek2• 13 years ago

C++ does not perform,...

You sure seem to be an expert on these things.

icelancer• 13 years ago

He could be Torvalds, I guess. :)

matjazmuhic• 13 years ago

Computer games which are impacted by performance the most are written in what language?

venomsnake4• 13 years ago

I doubt that C++ is chosen because of raw performance (both C# and Java are close enough), but mostly because of memory and cpu cycle determinism.

camus22• 13 years ago

C/C++ though game engines usually support higherlevel languages like Lua or Python.

tokenrove• 13 years ago

C with classes

jeremiep2• 13 years ago

The entire logic of most games is written in slow-ass languages like UnrealScript or LUA.

The runtimes of the games are often code monstrosities wasting performance here and there.

Performance is way over-rated.

hackaflocka• 13 years ago

Judging by their track record, I completely trust the geniuses at Microsoft to solve another non-existent problem /s.

venomsnake4• 13 years ago

MS have been very very good on the technical side of the things. It is the business decisions that mess things up.

The only really bad technical decision that they have taken is the broken security model of user accounts.

PhasmaFelis• 13 years ago

Do we really need more languages? Aren't there enough languages already?

I suspect I have just outed myself as a substandard hacker. :( But seriously! There's so many!

_random_6• 13 years ago

There aren't that many languages backed by a giant corporation (=> tools and docs). And no, we just need C# (multi-paradigm, multi-typed) with better performance - which is what they are doing.

dsl• 13 years ago

Well really we just need C, now get off my lawn.

Lerc2• 13 years ago

Yes, we need more. There are many ideas to explore still.

The "do we really need more languages?" argument predates most of my preferred languages(and that probably includes C and Pascal).

I like Haxe, Rust is looking like being really good also. I don't like Go but others do, and that is a really important point. You don't have to like, or use the new languages. As long as someone finds them useful they have a place.

dmpk2k• 13 years ago

I'm a bit leery of that argument, because in my experience the most important component of a language is its ecosystem. By far.

I've played with many really nice languages, but never used them seriously because they had no libraries (let alone quality libraries), had poor tooling, poor documentation, buggy runtime, and almost nobody to compare notes with. In my experience, the largest jump in productivity is libraries, not some feature of a language.

On the one hand, languages are useful to explore a space. On the other, there's a lot of reinvented wheels going on here. If all languages stuck with the same ABI (e.g. C), it'd be one thing, because then you could use the same libraries and many tools between languages. Unfortunately, they often cannot, and thus you can't. There's some serious opportunity cost going on here.

I'm happy using node.js at the moment (ooh, shiny!), but the current situation with a plethora of languages isn't exactly great either.

tetha• 13 years ago

We do, because if you reduce languages to their fundamental core, we had around... 3 - 6 languages in wide use.

Note that this means we need a language which has certain fundamental differences to existing languages, so we don't need YAJAWiSS (yet another java with syntactic sugar), but something that takes a step forward. Their error model, first class immutability and RAII outside of C++ might be something like this, if done well.

adamnemecek2• 13 years ago

There aren't that many languages in the systems space.

InclinedPlane2• 13 years ago

Of course we need more languages. We need to continue evolving languages until we get better and better ones. When languages stop improving so significantly from generation to generation then we can start settling down into a smaller number of languages.

We still haven't figured out the best tradeoffs between dynamism and type safety. And we definitely haven't sorted out the best set of features for memory management and error handling. And after that there are a lot of even bigger fish to fry.

qwerta• 13 years ago

I think Microsoft language research is wonderful. But they tools do not run on Linux and MacOS well.

dmunoz2• 13 years ago

I'm going to ramble a little below, so I'll get to the point up front: is there even a new language here? I don't mean in the sense that Rust seems to attempt what is being hand waved about in the submission, but that the linked blog post states

I’ve given a few glimpses into this work over the years. In the months to come, I will start sharing more details. My goal is to eventually open source this thing, but...

We'll have to wait and see, I guess. I also found this quote a bit odd

There are other candidates early in their lives, too, most notably Rust and D. But hey, my team works at Microsoft, where there is ample C# talent and community just an arm’s length away.

D is hardly early in its life, but there is something about the whole "my team works at Microsoft, where there is ample C# talent" bit that is so very Microsoft, and I don't mean because it mentions Microsoft and C#, but in the sense of how they tend to work there. At least, this is my outside view, based mostly on what they promise vs. actually deliver in the C++ world, and where their interest constantly seem to fall short. Of course, you can't blame Microsoft for being interested in advancing Microsoft.

With that out of the way, and being up front that the rest of this comment is unnecessary, I wonder why this is on the front page of Lambda the Ultimate. It's become a favourite site of mine as I've recently become a lot more interested in language implementations. I'm certain the comments on the article will make it worthy, but as it stands, and with my comments above out of the way, I don't see what it offers. It's just hand waving about some ideal language that doesn't (fully) exist yet. The actual answer to my question of why it is on the front page is because Charles Torre can make front page posts, but just be aware that he works at Microsoft and hypes up their behaviour (that I'm admittedly not so pleased with) often. I know he is, like me, actually interested in language implementations, and has made far more worthy contributions on LtU than I ever have, but the front page of LtU is usually a bit more grounded.

ehudla2• 13 years ago

For the record, Charles didn't post it to the home page. I promoted it there, since I thought (correctly, it turns out) that it might be of wide interest. So all the blame for that goes to me.

dmunoz2• 13 years ago

It's actually nice to see activity on the LtU front page. The two other posts I would assign to the same category as the submitted one would be xkcd: Functional [0] and The Three Laws of Programming Language Design [1] posts. They both had good discussion, which is where a lot of value at LtU comes from. I even wrote my own little script to make the expanded, threaded list of comments collapsible to consume them more to my liking.

To be fair, I was being unjustly negative because of my worry about how Microsoft treats such projects. Admittedly, after sleeping on it, I don't see it to be as big as a deal as I did last night. It'll be interesting to see what Microsoft produces, and we'll still have the open and approachable Rust regardless.

I find Charles reply to your comment about the HN thread odd though. He says

It's interesting, though not unexpected, that folks are already comparing this language to D, Rust, and Go which also aim for a nirvana (safe, productive, fast, open) without really having many of the details required to make intelligent comparisons (on reddit, somebody made a post asserting this language is MS's _answer_ to D and Rust... WTF?).

Why is this interesting or unexpected? Joe Duffy's blog post mentions D and Rust explicitly. That we don't have "many of the details required to make intelligent comparisons" was my issue with it being hand wavy. There are already conspiracy themed posts about this being because Microsoft wants to lock down patents on these parts of the language [2]. Post the details, and we'll likely see "intelligent comparisons" being made on HN and Reddit.

The post is spreading on Reddit as well, if you would like to see others feelings on the matter [3].

[0] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4816

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4754

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1tve0m/a_glimpse_into_...

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/duplicates/1tvic1/the_mi...

jedicoffee• 13 years ago

Sweet, in 4 years they can completely remove all support for it and start again!

moomin6• 13 years ago

This is going to be horribly negative so a bit of context first: I'm a professional C# programmer. I love C#, I think it's a great language.

But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). There's nothing here that suggests that this would have anything other than the same restrictions. So, assuming the language develops into everything that's promised, you're left with something on which you can't do mobile, can't do big data, probably won't work very well for scientific computing. In fact, basically you're still stuck with the same LoB apps and ETL tools that C#'s already great at. And probably the same second rate (not awful, not great) web experience.

So the best you can hope for, basically, is a better C#. But not good enough to take on Java.

Don't get me wrong, it sounds exciting, but equally I worry that it'll be used as a way to generate patents to prevent the ideas being used elsewhere in environments where, tbh, they'd find more use.

romanovcode2• 13 years ago

C# developer here, also love the language.

I completely agree and I only hope that this new thing will be just as good as C# but fully cross-platform. It would be great.

mobile

Xamarin is pretty solid, although it costs a lot.

tluyben22• 13 years ago

Xamarin has been nice so far; it's not that expensive compared to any serious project, but it should be cheaper to capture larger audiences. The free version is very crippled even for trivial projects.

venomsnake4• 13 years ago

Project Rotor will be left in the history books as the "Java killer that was never unleashed". I remember using C# back in 2005 and just thinking how far ahead of everything it was. But it was never allowed to leave the shackles of MS.

hhariri• 13 years ago

You looked at Kotlin? As a C# developer I'm loving the language and it is x-platform.

And that's despite my assumed bias, because I work at JetBrains.

rplnt• 13 years ago

yeah, I know about Mono

What's wrong with Mono? I worked with C# only briefly and I really liked it (as opposed to Java.. but maybe I just had better tools). If I'd need something a bit faster than python, C# would probably be my choice. That's assuming it's portable to other platforms...

OGC• 13 years ago

Work with Mono and report back..

taude2• 13 years ago

I've tried working with Mono on my Mac. Meh. You loose a big part of the eco-system of third-party libraries because almost every program I've written uses a ton of third-party libraries. When ever you google soething on C#, you'll likely be getting windows specific results.

Once you go down the pain of getting Mono to run on Linux...you may as well have just written your program in Java (or something else).

While I loved working with C#, once we moved down the path of moving off Windows platform, it's just easier to learn a new language and change your tooling.

AnthonyAkentiev• 13 years ago

I am big C++ fan, but i understand that the C++ language is going into nowhere. It's like "all in one" solution that is too big, too hard to learn and use nowadays. I've been using C++ for more than 10 years, still many things are shocking me ))

I am sure C# is the "Next Main Desktop App Dev. Language". I really wish MS would OPEN-SOURCE it one day. You can read article in my blog about that here (really short): http://anthonyakentiev.github.io/blog/2013/12/08/what-if-see...

I wish C# will be used freely everywhere - on Apple, on Android, on Linux... Really - Mono/Xamarin does not have a full .NET/CLR/C#/frameworks support.

platz• 13 years ago

From Joe Duffy's Blog [1]:

"Finally, you might wonder, “Why not base it on C++?” As we’ve progressed, I do have to admit that I often wonder whether we should have started with C++, and worked backwards to carve out a “safe subset” of the language."

...

"I do expect to take our learnings and explore this avenue at some point, largely for two reasons: (1) it will ease portability for a larger number of developers (there’s a lot more C++ on Earth than C#), and (2) I dream of standardizing the ideas, so that the OSS community also does not need to make the difficult “safe/productive vs. performant” decision."

"But for the initial project goals, I am happy to have begun with C#, not the least reason for which is the rich .NET frameworks that we could use as a blueprint (noting that they needed to change pretty heavily to satisfy our goals)."

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ajoedu...

sillysaurus22• 13 years ago

C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono).

Speaking of Mono, does anyone know of a good resource for C#/.NET devs to learn how to port their Windows apps to Linux/Mac relatively easily?

I did a writeup a month ago about my first impressions of Mono: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6744622

In short, there don't seem to be very many "Here's how to write cross-platform C# code that runs on all three platforms without much effort" type resources. It seems like most Mono newcomers will find it difficult to get up and running, especially if you've been developing your app with Visual Studio 2010 or later. So it seems like there aren't very many good tutorials written specifically to teach Windows C# devs how to quickly get up to speed with Mono.

After spending some time researching the idea of writing GUI apps using C# and Mono, I gave up because it just didn't seem straightforward. Maybe I was going about it the wrong way, but it seemed like Python + Qt bindings would be a more effective approach, even though you lose out Visual Studio's awesome GUI designer. But I haven't actually tried python+qt yet on all three platforms, so maybe it isn't as easy as it seems. And my Qt knowledge is somewhat dated, so maybe there's a better solution nowadays.

Does anyone have any recommendations for the easiest way to write cross-platform GUI apps that can run without an internet connection? I was thinking maybe making it a webapp, but the offline requirement seems to rule that out. (Has localstorage progressed to the point where people can start up a browser "app" without an internet connection? I haven't looked into it for awhile.)

Plus I'm not sure how easy it is to write custom webapp GUI objects compared to the fantastic ease of writing custom .NET GUI objects via the VS GUI designer. Although anything that lets you quickly and easily write powerful GUI apps that run on all three platforms would be pretty fantastic. What toolset would you use to get the job done?

EDIT: Hmm, just thought of another idea... Would Clojure work well for writing native GUI apps? It's based on the JVM, so it seems like it could leverage existing GUI libraries. (All the Java GUI libs used to suck, but maybe the situation's improved now that Clojure is popular.)

bluefinity• 13 years ago

If you want to use C#, the easiest way is probably using GtkSharp. I don't know if there's a way to use the VS GUI designer, but MonoDevelop has a built in GUI designer that works with GtkSharp -- and MonoDevelop runs on Windows too.

Might be worth trying out. You can still run your application on Microsoft's .NET stack on Windows, GtkSharp supports it just fine, and because it uses GTK it will look native on all of the supported platforms.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried any of the above.

barrkel2• 13 years ago

I've ported an app from Winforms to Gtk-Sharp.

At first, I ran with the Mono reimplementation of Winforms on Linux. That didn't work very well. There are a lot of little incompatibilities, like differences in how keystrokes are translated, and very buggy text boxes.

So I reimplemented the UI in Gtk-Sharp. That was mostly a matter of translating existing Gtk documentation to the OO API presented by the C# wrapper. I could write this in Visual Studio and run using Gtk on Windows to test; Mono itself wasn't actually needed here.

I then ran the app using Mono on Windows. Once all the DLLs were in the right places, it mostly just worked. Running it on Linux - specifically, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS - was a little trickier, as Ubuntu has split out many of the different assemblies into separate packages, and you have to grovel around a bit to get what you want, if you don't want everything. But again, it mostly just worked.

Compiling using Mono took a little bit of figuring out - mainly, finding out I had to use dmcs rather than mcs or gmcs to enable the right language features. But again, once the right assemblies were referenced on the command line, it mostly just worked.

Writing a cross-platform app in Mono? I wouldn't really try that. Having a separate UI layer for each platform gets you a much better experience. Gtk programming itself is extremely clunky compared to Winforms, which itself is quite clunky - albeit in different dimensions - compared either with Delphi's VCL or WPF. But it was the only way I could see to go to get a reasonable experience on Linux.

davidw• 13 years ago

Does anyone have any recommendations for the easiest way to write cross-platform GUI apps that can run without an internet connection?

Granted, for many people, it's about as hip as Rails is to a newly converted node.js fan, but Tcl and Tk are still a pretty good way of writing smaller apps that run cross platform. Like someone else says, if you want a native GUI, you really need to write that separately for each platform. But that's a big investment, and for some systems, it might not be worthwhile.

shadowmint4• 13 years ago

Don't bother. No one is maintaining the cross platform GTK bindings (or .Net MVC framework) and basically no one cares about it. It's just getting more and more out of date.

Look at an actively maintained solution like Xamarin or Unity; Xamarin lets you write your UI specific code for each platform; Unity lets you share UI across platforms but you won't get a 'native' look and feel on any.

For both of these you won't be able to use the majority of existing .Net infrastructure (nlog, nject, nhibernate, etc) because they are locked into the windows CLR, but there are a few ports and you can often get away with compiling the source from codeplex yourself (the prebuilt DLLs just wont work).

(Unfortunately, porting your existing application is absolutely out of the question in most cases, for the reason above. Perhaps if you've carefully isolated concerns it might be possible...)

cmiles74• 13 years ago

I have been building GUI applications with Java and Swing for some time. I am willing to go on-the-record and state that Swing provides a reliable and thorough cross-platform GUI toolkit. Once you put the work in, you really can build an application that looks native-ish and does the same thing on Windows, Linux/GTK and Mac OSX. Unfortunately the learning curve is quite steep, many things are more complicated then they need to be.

I have just started working on GUI apps with Clojure and the story is much better so far! Seesaw[0] definitely slims up the Swing code, and I've been using Core.Async[1] to remove a lot of the callback handlers. So far, so good. :-) It's definitely worth looking into.

[0] https://github.com/daveray/seesaw

[1] https://github.com/clojure/core.async

krisgenre• 13 years ago

A webapp doesn't necessarily have to be hosted on the internet. You can try with embedded server - Java + Jetty + GWT.

jbeja• 13 years ago

If python is the language that you are gonna use, you would try Kivy cross-platform framework to make GUI for desktop and mobile.

dubcanada• 13 years ago

If you want to write cross platform applications use Qt. End of story, it's the only extremely well supported cross platform GUI framework out there. If you are looking for a smaller framework you can try WxWidgets, but I would stay away from GTK. GTK has been getting less and less support since version 2. Version 3 is only Mac and Linux and the Mac version is terrible, there is a "custom" Windows version by some french guy, but it's just that, not community supported.

You could also take a look at Juce, depending on what you need to do with it.

But, if you don't mind large binaries you could easily embed a chromium or awesomium layer as your frontend and do your frontend in html/css/javascript and use JavaScript to communicate with your backend.

As people as said, the best idea would be to write one backend and three or two frontends. That will give you the best experience on all three platforms, and the native GUI look, something that on Mac Qt still suffers with.

edwinnathaniel3• 13 years ago

I'm in the market of cross-platform desktop application as well and I've been monitoring Mono/Ximian for a while until last night when I was searching for a .NET Oauth 2.0 library and came across of a project called DotNetOAuth which after further digging does not work on Mono.

I'm a Java developer and I would write the software using Java if only Java isn't stigmatized by "bad software" in the desktop market. It's too bad because so far only Java that provide some of the solutions for me in a few areas to tackle in the cross-platform desktop market, namely: dealing with dependencies, rich 3rd-party libraries (and most of them are FOSS) and a packaging tool for Mac App-Store!.

I wouldn't mind writing 3 different UI code as long as I can share the back-end part and that shareable code works consistently across platform (i.e.: something that communicate with an embedded database like SQLite).

Can anyone share their experience using Mono for cross-platform desktop application that requires DB connection and potentially deal with Service API (i.e.: Twitter, Dropbox, etc)?

My requirements are as follow:

1. Installer/Packager

Something that can help me to generate installer for Windows 7, Mac AppStore, Ubuntu software center (or .deb). RPM would be nice but I can live with writing shell script.

2. Build+Dependency management (don't know if NuGet works flawlessly or not in Linux/Mac)

Maven spoiled me (people who dislike Maven please close your eyes...). I've read that Mono has xbuild but the documentation seems... lacking.

3. Unit-testing

Something where I can run unit-tests through the IDE so I can debug directly from my unit-tests when bugs are found.

4. Good enough 3rd-party libraries

I'm down writing missing libraries if needed but my first priority is the app itself.

ksk7• 13 years ago

So the best you can hope for, basically, is a better C#. But not good enough to take on Java.

From the linked material - What are you basing this statement on?

_random_6• 13 years ago

C# itself is better than Java, so the new language must be 2x better than Java

Kiro• 13 years ago

(yeah, I know about Mono)

Mono solves everything you complain about and that's the only mention it gets?

_random_6• 13 years ago

It's like saying "Java only works on old Nokia phones (yeah I know about all other ports of JVM)".

nkohari• 13 years ago

I don't know about desktop or mobile, but my experience with Mono for web applications has been pretty awful in comparison to Microsoft's implementation. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the Mono team, but it's just not a good enough replacement.

It's actually caused me to stop writing C#, because I can't stand managing Windows systems, but there isn't really a good alternative.

catnaroek7• 13 years ago

But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows.

Not true. And, even if it were, how is that in any way a downside from Microsoft's point of view? As a Linux user myself, the main reason why I switched from Windows is that all the exciting advances in programming languages are happening in * nix-land, mainly Haskell and Rust. If there were some super-duper-awesome language for which Windows were the first-class platform, I would seriously consider switching back. I do not give a single damn about software freedom, technical excellence trumps all else.

So, assuming the language develops into everything that's promised, you're left with something on which you can't do mobile, can't do big data, probably won't work very well for scientific computing.

Or Microsoft could be aspiring to make Windows a viable platform for all of those applications. Just because today Windows sucks for them, it does not mean it has to suck forever.

So the best you can hope for, basically, is a better C#. But not good enough to take on Java.

Java's sole achievement is being consistently (as in "in the same way") crappy on all platforms. I would much rather be locked into a single platform for which there is an awesome language.

mcdougle• 13 years ago

I dunno. I agree with you that "only works in Windows" is not a downside for MS, but.... I'd argue that the best way for them to make Windows a good programming platform would be to make it better and easier to program in the other languages already there -- C++, Java, PHP, Rails all work on Windows, just... not as easily as on *nix. Although I guess a new, good language wouldn't hurt.

edwinnathaniel3• 13 years ago

Some of the .net libraries only run on Windows CLR. Example: DotNetOauth. Many other people pointed out other libs as well.

Kick-ass language with poor ecosystem is the common symptoms of academic language: for fun but lack of productivity and not battle tested.

raptormissle2• 13 years ago

I would much rather be locked into a single platform for which there is an awesome language.

So you would rather be locked into a single crappy platform with a crappy language that only works on that single crappy platform?

mpg33• 13 years ago

I don't see why Microsoft would create something that would work on other systems....they want people to use Windows.

acqq• 13 years ago

And they even let their the conflicts of interests influence the development of their programming languages. C# is the best example. There are more reasons why C# has poorer performance and less libraries outside of Windows but most can be tracked to the interest in Microsoft to have something tightly enough controlled and bound to Windows.

yareally• 13 years ago

Of course they want people to use their OS (just like Apple wants people to use theirs), but that does not mean they always lock the language into the OS. They created TypeScript, licensed it under Apache 2.0 and made the installer for it an npm package in Node[1].

[1] npm install -g typescript and it's installed and ready to go wherever you are using Node.js

sjs12342• 13 years ago

It is a systems language. The competitors are c, c++, go, and D. Within Microsoft it's just c and c++. Competition with Java is irrelevant, c# already occupies that space. Microsoft has enough need and scale that a systems language that picks up internal use is justified. The use case is making platforms, not crossing them.

catnaroek7• 13 years ago

Go, a systems language? I would not be so sure. Stop-the-world garbage collection and dynamically typed interfaces seem like a poor fit for this niche.

grandeb• 13 years ago

I miss the HN of old where there were hardcore technical discussions about the merits and demerits of the technical approaches in such posts. Here we have almost none of those and instead there is lot of horse beating about aspects that are not even announced yet, taking sides in big tech politics etc, especially in upvoted comments, a trend which I previously noticed slowly dominated and then killed Slashdot. I guess I must be getting too old for HN and the marked shift in the audience.

sergiotapia2• 13 years ago

For what it's worth if I'm getting voted up in my comments, I take it as a sign that HN is declining.

asveikau3• 13 years ago

I haven't been on here long enough to remember an HN of old, but I totally agree that on a lot of topics the depth is lacking here. Witness that TFA is all about how GC makes C# kind of suck, and that is the big thing they are trying to fix. Any commenters showing signs of grokking this? Nope, they are mostly talking about C# being awesome.

I think a lot of folks here have a hard time thinking about a world without GC or that GC might ever be a bad thing.

Locke16892• 13 years ago

Ah, but you forgot to note that this language is being developed in the context of a research operating system, so there's no guarantee it even runs on Windows ;)

computerslol4• 13 years ago

It looks like you have a very narrow perspective on C#.

I've never tried running .net on a non-windows platform, so I can't comment in that space. I'll leave that to someone else.

As someone who's built bespoke big data applications, scientific computing (if we're both talking about large scale computation for analytics), desktop applications, server applications/services, and web sites (one of which is within the US top 150 on alexa) in c#; I'll have to disagree that anyone working in the language is stuck with LoB applications and ETL tools.

moomin6• 13 years ago

I think you're missing my point, it's about sweet spots. C# has a sweet spot on windows desktop and ETL style data processing. You could have written all of those things in C++, Java or Python. But the ecosystem isn't there. There's no Hadoop, SciPy, Django or Rails. For crying out loud, just running a less compiler on Windows required someone to sit down and rewrite it from scratch. (The node story has improved on windows since then.)

And none of this looks likely to change. Windows has been a second rate development platform for some time now, and Microsoft don't mind.

lukasm• 13 years ago

I think MS has finally realised that they no longer have monopol. Have a look at F# totally open source and work well on Linux. TypeScript is distributed with npm.

JTenerife• 13 years ago

C# only works on Windows

That's not true.

yeah, I know about Mono

And you know it :-). I agree if you want to express that C# on Linux is a niche. But there're big projects using it in production. Have a look at the Mono project page. Also, have a look at Xamarin.

can't do mobile, can't do big data, probably won't work very well for scientific computing

There's no language that does all these things well. Java is for Android and big data suited, but not for scientific computing. Fortran, C and C++ are great at scientific computing, but certainly not for mobile (except Qt on niche plattforms). Objective C is not appropriate for big data and scientific computing. Rust and Go aren't the can-do-it-all languages / ecosystems either.

C# and the .NET ecosystem are actually second to Java in terms of reach and versality. Taking Xamarin into account C# has the top spot for mobile.

equally I worry that it'll be used as a way to generate patents to prevent the ideas being used elsewhere

FUD

romanovcode2• 13 years ago

I would imagine that language like that would be one of the best you could hope for. I hope this language will fit all the bullets.

- C# syntactic sugar

- As fast as C++

- Does not require .NET

- Runs on Windows/Linux/Unix with no problems

leifus• 13 years ago

Sounds a lot like D (http://dlang.org/)...

munchor• 13 years ago

Or Vala (https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala/Tutorial).

thirdsight5• 13 years ago

Sounds like Java 8!

deletes• 13 years ago

Doesn't Java still require an instalation of JRE, which is an analogue to .NET?

edit: If it somehow didn't need it, I would start considering it as my next language to learn.

catnaroek7• 13 years ago

- C# syntactic sugar

No, we need better foundations.

- As fast as C++

I think it is not so much about raw speed (although this is certainly important) as it is about reliability. Raw speed (and, in general, runtime efficiency) is usually a corollary of elegance in design.

Now that we have programming languages with linear types and static lifetime management (Rust), I think it is fair to say garbage-collected systems have "duck-typed lifetimes" and languages with raw pointers have "untyped lifetimes".

And here is the catch: The principle that duck typing adds overhead (unacceptable for systems programming) does not only apply to values (in the form of the "type tag" that every value must carry), it applies to lifetimes as well (in the form of garbage collection pauses)!

Furthermore, I strongly suspect the aforementioned principle applies to anything worthy of being expressed statically. Off of the top of my head: validity of indices for sequential containers and keys for associative containers, which requires dependent types to be expressed statically, and whose duck typing counterpart is throwing something like .NET's ArgumentOutOfRangeException or KeyNotFoundException.

ben_hall2• 13 years ago

C# might be a great language now, but 1.0 was horrible! It was a painful experience to gain adoption within companies and frameworks on top of it (ASP+ for example) still needed to mature. The world is different now.

I predict Microsoft will push NodeJS / JavaScript / HTML5 for application development. I'm assuming this will be targeted towards the Go style community and applications. It has a lot of the same properties with Go starting to gain traction I can see why Microsoft would be exploring the space.

_random_6• 13 years ago

"NodeJS / JavaScript / HTML5" - more likely to be just another option to satisfy everyone. I would rather move to Scala than use JS for anything other than rich GUI. Who wants to support business logic implemented in JS by an average developer?

tomjakubowski• 13 years ago

Why give up Scala when you're writing code for the browser? https://github.com/scala-js/scala-js

ben_hall2• 13 years ago

Microsoft would never promote Scala as it's a JVM language. NodeJS is likely given the recent relationship with Red Gate and effort surrounding Azure support.

As for business logic by an average developer - I would say the same thing about every language.

yeukhon2• 13 years ago

5) Modern error model.

I am pretty excited to see this. Any existing language out there actually does this?

m_mueller• 13 years ago

It sounded a lot like Eiffel[1] to me, except they also have traditional Exceptions when you need them.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_(programming_language)#E...

klibertp• 13 years ago

Racket, of course!

Very sophisticated contract system and exceptions and reified continuations.

It's dynamic, JITed language, and it's a Lisp, but I recommend studying it just for the sake of learning various techniques Racket uses. They are frequently very interesting from the language design perspective and their usage is easier to understand than in Haskell :)

EdwardDiego3• 13 years ago

it’s not uncommon for us to encounter 30-50% time spent in GC

Hmm... not sure if that's just C#, or if I should start profiling my Java apps a lot more closely.

stusmall• 13 years ago

I'd written a JVM project a while ago that also spent an ungodly amount of time in GC. You can create bottlenecks almost anywhere given enough (lack of) effort. Who knows how finely tuned these projects were or what their load was like before a rewrite. A rewrite in a new language gives you more benefits than just the new language , it also gives you the benefit of hindsight. The ability to fix mistakes made in the first implementation can go a long way.

EdwardDiego3• 13 years ago

Who knows how finely tuned these projects were or what their load was like before a rewrite. A rewrite in a new language gives you more benefits than just the new language , it also gives you the benefit of hindsight. The ability to fix mistakes made in the first implementation can go a long way.

That's a very good point with these rewrite stories - you could happen to rewrite some really poor code while porting and boom! Language Y is 50% more performant!

yarou2• 13 years ago

It's interesting that there is renewed interest in finding a "modern" systems programming language. I'm not entirely sure if the world

yarou2• 13 years ago

It's interesting that there's renewed interest in a modern systems programming language. However, I feel as though the world doesn't need another ALGOL-like language. C# is very good at what it does, but managed code will always execute at a slight penalty vs native code. Nonetheless this will be an interesting experiment into a modern "safe" systems language.

molsson2• 13 years ago

The homepage of Joe Duffy says "I’ve been granted 45 patents, with another 33 pending" (see his homepage under /about via google cache since the page is down due to load from HN). Bragging about patents doesn't exactly make me like the guy. Has he been living under a rock, why would he write that on his about page?

Anyway, he says explicitly that he cannot reveal any details at this point; i.e. Microsoft has filed patents related to this "new langage" and can't talk about it until they are approved. He also claims to have been working on his "new language" for 5 years already; I wonder what those 33 patents he says he got pending are? Or maybe he patented 33 things related to something he hasn't been working on for the last 5 years? Not likely. Microsoft will get more and more desperate as they continue to be marginalized in terms of market cap, market share and developer mindshare. They have a long track record of simply being dicks (i.e. just look at how they charge royalty for every android phone, and how they created the Rock Star patent troll company etc).

It would be better for everyone if Microsoft stayed out of the "perf + productivity" language niche.

throwawaykf033• 13 years ago

Bragging about patents doesn't exactly make me like the guy. Has he been living under a rock...

No, you've been living in an echo chamber :-)

Open source enthusiasts may well want to share their work for free (or statistically more likely, use others' work for free), but that's their prerogative. Most companies will not give away their competitive advantage and will seek to protect it anyway they can, and similarly, they are well within their rights to do so.

However, open source seems to be the dominant religion around here. And also you have a lot of Google employees here, and Google is a bit handicapped when it comes to patents at the moment. This is why you hear a disproportionate amount of anti-patent rhetoric. Outside these circles, most engineers are either ignorant about patents or quite proud of their patents.

thomasahle• 13 years ago

you have a lot of Google employees here, and Google is a bit handicapped when it comes to patents at the moment. This is why you hear a disproportionate amount of anti-patent rhetoric.

Do you actually belive this?

most engineers are either ignorant about patents or quite proud of their patents.

Cooperate America seems to be the only echo chamber that belives software patents are a pretty neat idea.

alok-g2• 13 years ago

> Joe Duffy says "I’ve been granted 45 patents, with another 33 pending"
> Bragging about patents doesn't exactly make me like the guy.

Genuinely asking, do you see putting information on patents as bragging or more generally as a negative? I have also been putting the same on my profile, so would like to understand your viewpoint better to see if I should remove it.

My side of the story:

I have nearly always worked for big technology companies and for various reasons they are always very protective of their IP. This means that an employee can barely talk about his/her projects at the company without making the description too generic. People are barely allowed to publish papers on their work, make contributions to open-source (unless with consent of the employer, which is rare), and cannot have side projects [1].

Such generic descriptions of the projects and a mere mention of the skills do not leave many options for employees to demonstrate their expertise. Recommendations is one way (and I correspondingly have plenty of stellar ones on my LinkedIn profile), but is also gamed a lot: I know several cases where non-deserving people also have great recommendations.

Then comes the patent filings. I have been known as a well-respected and "a prolific inventor" in my last employment, the "most original thinker" at college, etc. Yet, it is hard to reflect this on the profile or CV since these terms by themselves are also often overused.

[1] While it may be a common practice to have side projects, the employment agreements most big technology companies have, that most people sign without even reading, place a lot of restrictions on the side projects. These issues have been discussed on HN several times before. In fact, since most employees do not even read these agreements, talk about negotiating on them, the equilibrium position for these agreements is heavily biased in the favor of employers than of employees.

molsson2• 13 years ago

Software patents are contentious issue for some people so it's not something I'd include in a CV or on an open accessible "about page".

sergiotapia2• 13 years ago

I just hope it's not so heavily tied to an IDE. One of the things I really enjoy about using Go and Ruby is that I can use whatever the heck I want to write code. C# was my first language learning and it took a while to shake off the notion that "everything must be done with an IDE".

samirahmed• 13 years ago

I couldn't agree more.

That said, I think hidden in your last sentence is the fact that working with C# in an IDE with a statically typed language is such a pleasure.

For most mundane code (loops, linq, if/else), Resharper will literally autocomplete everything.

I really wish other languages offered such tooling at times.

I don't think any other language/IDE combo comes close (in my opinion).

kooshball• 13 years ago

Modern Java with IntelliJ is similar.

EdwardDiego3• 13 years ago

Try Intellij IDEA with Java and the various Java frameworks - IDEA is Jetbrains' (developers of Resharper) flagship IDE, they also do slightly more focused variants for Python, Ruby, PHP, and web development (PyCharm, RubyMine, PHPStorm, and WebStorm respectively.)

laureny• 13 years ago

I am quite disturbed by this claim:

It’s commonly claimed that with type-safety comes an inherent loss of performance

If we've learned anything, it's that type safety buys you performance because it enables a lot of compiler optimizations that are not possible in dynamically typed languages.

Other than that, the language sounds very interesting but if it's going to be Windows only, it will suffer the same fate as C#: powerful but crippled by its platform boundaries in a way that will make it impossible to compete with Java.

brandonbloom3• 13 years ago

I assumed he meant safety in the general sense or memory safety specifically. Things like array bounds checks, dynamic cast failures throwing exceptions, etc.

Sssnake9• 13 years ago

But he said type safety, which is entirely compile time and allows you to avoid run time checks, making it faster not slower.

lmkg• 13 years ago

He's distinguishing between safe and unsafe languages, not between static and dynamic languages. The general mindset is that C++ can be faster than Java because it lets you do unsafe operations like pointer arithmetic and reinterpreting the raw bits from one type of data as another type, while Java requires you to go through (safe) interfaces or disallows those operations altogether.

sebastianconcpt• 13 years ago

Sounds like a lot of effort to pay in exchange of an incremental improvement of C#.

alco• 13 years ago

YAGPL (yet another general-purpose language).

I think we've had enough of those in the past decade. Each one has something new to offer, but at the same time it disperses attention of the programmer crowd and so less effort is put into each language's development.

I think we need to experiment more with single-purpose languages. I'm not saying DSLs because those are mostly embedded syntactic constructs in existing languages. By single-purpose I mean an independent language (not just new syntax, but semantics as well, and possibly new runtime) that does one thing and does it well.

I believe such a language will have much more luck in becoming the single good enough solution for a particular problem (any problem it chooses to address, but only that one). There is really no hope for any general-purpose language to be a good fit for the whole wide spectrum of problems modern computing needs to solve.

corysama• 13 years ago

How about a system for creating single-purpose languages?

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

dded• 13 years ago

Do you have any "particular problem" in mind? You don't mention one.

I think the trouble with single-purpose languages is that, realistically, their development needs to be motivated by a real problem not satisfactorily addressed by an existing language. And since the people with these problems are not often going to be language designers, most such opportunities will be missed. I'm frankly surprised by the existence of Julia.

josephcooney• 13 years ago

Fetching information from a data store of some kind, and presenting it as a web page would be a good one.

btbuildem• 13 years ago

Sigh.. a Windows-only language? Really? Talk about ivory tower..

computerslol4• 13 years ago

Is this a research project, or something that will be released to the public?

As someone that's spent a lot of time learning how to get c# to perform, this sounds fantastic to me. I can't wait to see it.

pandora99• 13 years ago

who needs another Windows only new programming language?

stcredzero• 13 years ago

Part of what my team does is regularly convert C# programs to this new language, and it’s not uncommon for us to encounter 30-50% time spent in GC. For servers, this kills throughput

I think a lot of money in computer technology is made off of the cluelessness of application programmers. Then again, sometimes "cluelessness" = "schlepping" = opportunity. Azul systems Zing JVM is an example of this. Instead of arcane tuning, architecture, and optimization, you just put in a pauseless GC VM.

ARC with Objective-C shows that one can have automated deterministic memory management that's not only workable in practice, it works about as well as GC. That is, 90% of the time, with gotchas for application programmers not paying enough attention the other 10%. A functional language should enable a "just works" percentage even higher than 90%.

groovy2shoes• 13 years ago

C# but with better performance? Sounds a bit like Delphi with curly braces.

forgotAgain• 13 years ago

I think they would be better off porting C# to other platforms. Their long term strategy of keeping developers locked up on Windows has become counter productive. Developers want / need to develop on Apple and Android platforms as well as Windows.

Microsoft has great development tools. It would be better for them to hold onto the developers and share them with other platforms rather than losing them completely. By making their development tools multi-platform they would be bringing many developers to Windows who today want little to do with that platform.

kolev2• 13 years ago

No Linux and Mac, no thank you!

kolev2• 13 years ago

To clarify, Mono is no Stereo: no first-class support of non-Windows platforms pretty much dooms the language. And it's not about where you develop, it's where you deploy. I'm not gonna switch to Azure or AWS/Windows, because of a fancier language when there are D, Go, and others!

raptormissle2• 13 years ago

Just like Microsoft copied Java with C# they are now trying to copy Go. Always late to the party as usual.

kevingadd• 13 years ago

Ignoring the fact that the post directly references Rust and D (languages that are actually similar to this effort), they have no reason to copy anything from Go because existing Microsoft libraries and languages already do everything Go does with more mature libraries and a more mature runtime (for example, unlike Go, Microsoft's runtime has a precise garbage collector!)

Pxtl• 13 years ago

A part of me is very excited by this. C# lives in a very interesting place now - MVC and EF are open-source and Mono is getting mature. There are tons of blind, stupid alleys of bad politics in C#'s library, but MS seems to have worked out the kinks.

A new gaming-compatible language that breaks free from the old legacy and purely embraces the new Microsoft platforms and their semi-open development model could be excellent. And with MS offering hardware platforms for gaming, mobile, desktop, and server, there's a lot of space for this language to really shine - a good systems language for XBox and WinPhone would be beautiful.

And while I'd cringe at another platform-specific language, Apple has proven that people will suffer through your exotic toolchain if it means getting to develop for a popular platform.

The biggest problem historically with C# isn't the windows-specific nature of the platform, it's the heavily Cathedral-oriented community. Developers are married to Microsoft libs, even when they suck, and it doesn't have the kind of open reusable tools that other platforms have. Microsoft has finally started achieving this, but only by creating open-source communities around their existing libs like EF and MVC.

brianbarker• 13 years ago

"...that a nirvana for a modern general purpose language would be one that satisfies high productivity (ease of use, intuitive, high level) AND guaranteed (type)safety AND high execution performance..."

So they're making MS Go. Just like C# is MS Java.

A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

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